Mr Rolleston has fulfilled these conditions with the skill and the
feeling of an artist. He has clung closely to his originals with an
affectionate regard for their ancientry, their ardour and their
distinction, and yet has, within this limit, used and modified them
with a pleasant freedom. His love of Ireland has instilled into his
representation of these tales a passion akin to that which gave them
birth. We feel, as we read, how deep his sympathy has been with their
intensity, their love of wild nature, their desire for beauty, their
interest in humanity and in character, their savagery and their
tenderness, their fairy magic and strange imaginations that suddenly
surprise and charm. Whenever anything lovely emerges in the tale, he
does not draw attention to it, but touches it with so artistic a
pencil that its loveliness is enhanced. And he has put into English
verse the Irish poems scattered through the tales with the skill and
the temper of a poet. I hope his book will win what it deserves--the
glad appreciation of old and young in England, and the gratitude of
Ireland.

The stories told in this book belong to three distinct cycles of Irish
story-telling. The first are mythological, and are concerned with the
early races that are fabled to have dwelt and fought in Ireland Among
these the Tuatha De Danaan were the final conquerors, and held the
land for two hundred years They were, it is supposed, of the Celtic
stock, but they were not the ancestors of the present Irish. These
were the Milesians (Irish, Scots or Gaelic who, conquering the Tuatha
De Danaan, ruled Ireland till they were overcome by the English.) The
stories which have to do with the Tuatha De Danaan are mythical and of
a great antiquity concerning men and women, the wisest and the best of
whom became gods, and who appear as divine beings in the cycle of